Dormant by Harriet Ribot

In Dormant, Harriet Ribot’s deeply honest first book of poetry, the reader is invited to share a writer’s late life self-discovery. With children long ago raised and husband gone, Ribot doesn’t over-romanticize her lived experience. “When your brain/has lain/dormant/what torment/to waken this thing” she tells us in the title poem. In another she writes, “Patience is time spread thin over peaks of frustration/and mounds of buried dreams, still visible/as one looks back over many years.” A deep and playful affection for language lace together love, loss and painful awakening throughout this lovely book.

–Roy Nathanson is author of Subway Moon, and teaches music at the NYU Gallatin School.

“I write to share” writes Harriet Ribot in her new book of poems, Dormant. Words tumble gently down the page. An occasional rhyme gives a boost. But the poems always land, gently, in the heart. Maybe, as “The Little Imp” says, “The whole world has a common bond of loneliness.” Maybe, as in “The Net,” There are “structures/holding us together in delicate balance.” In this “keep-moving world” where we “drink from the fountain of kiss,” Harriet reminds us that when you are on “the corner of somewhere to someplace else” that “life’s what you choose—not what you’ve found.” “Loosen up…” she urges, “live it up…show love to someone else!” Reader, follow the advice in these poems, and join with our Poet, saying “Having loved, I can face the future.”

–Bob Holman, activist, poet and filmmaker, is author of 17 volumes of poetry, most recently (Un)spoken and Life Poem, is founder of the Bowery Poetry Club and host of Language Matters